Saturday: Day 6

Saturday was probably one of the most interesting days of the trip so far. We drove a couple hours northwest to the city limits to Cu Chi District, where we visited the famous Cu Chi tunnels. The tunnels site is basically an old battlefield. During the war, US troops were stationed all around the city, including in Cu Chi District, and the Viet Cong resistance established the tunnel network as a means to hide their forces and launch surprise attacks on the Americans and their allies while avoiding detection. Cu Chi District is way out on the outskirts of the city, so we had to bus through a pretty rural area to get to them. The day was one of the hottest yet, and we were out in the jungle, so the heat was a big problem. It did nothing to lessen the impact of the tunnels, though. The site was incredible. We were first led on a dirt path through the jungle, past a few pavilion housing display cases of old guns and artillery, to another pavilion for a short presentation. This pavilion had a TV, a map of the District, and an old diorama of a portion of the tunnels, complete with flashing lights to represent explosions. Before their representative came, Dr. Berman and Pete gave us a presentation on the history and significance of the tunnels. After that, their person came over and played us a video. Dr. Berman had warned us about the video beforehand, but it was still a pretty jarring experience. The video was made in the 1960's while the war was still going on, and was clearly made as a propaganda film against the Americans. It was black and white, bad quality, and full of narrative exalting Viet Cong heroes for the number of Americans they had killed and condemning American soldiers for the atrocities they had committed. It definitely offered a different perspective of the war, to say the least. I think a lot of us were pretty uncomfortable after seeing it.

In any case, once the video ended, the real tour of the site began. We were paired with a cheerful tour guide who took us around and explained all the exhibits to us. The first was an old well, and it was our first chance to go into the tunnels. Clearly, these tunnels weren't made to accommodate most of us. Even with the expansions and restorations they must have done to make the site fit for tourists, a lot of us barely made it through the tunnels. Whenever we went down, I had to practically crawl on hands and knees to make it through, and I'm not even the tallest one on the trip. They're also very narrow, and anyone who is at all claustrophobic definitely shouldn't attempt to go through. After the first site, our guide showed us a couple examples of the methods used to hide the countless entrances, peepholes, and sniper bunkers that the Viet Cong had hidden all throughout the jungle. He opened a tiny opening in the ground and, after waving goodbye, lowered himself in and closed the opening. There is absolutely no way that anyone who didn't know where it was could have found the entrance. We practically lost it, and we had just watching him lower himself into it! A few minutes later, he popped out of another hole a few feet away (that, again, no one had noticed). He then led us past a few different examples of traps that were set in the jungle to catch and injure careless patrolling soldiers. We got to go through a few more tunnels, these ones with displays showing Viet Cong soldiers cooking, working, and caring for wounded (along with more than a few real-life bats).

I think I was beginning to understand how awful it must have been fighting in the jungle. Between the hidden entrances, gun posts that look like rocks, and punji stick traps in the ground, I would have been terrified to walk anywhere in the jungle. We had a moment where, at Dr. Berman's suggestion, we just walked through the jungle in silence. Listening to the forest, hearing all the natural sounds and seeing how empty everything looked, I caught a sense of what it must have felt like being a soldier walking through those same trees.

The whole area is also covered in old bomb craters. They're all overgrown now, but you can still see the big cavities carved into the earth throughout the jungle. The whole site is built up to be a big tourist attraction, with the built-up paths and colorful exhibits of weapons and traps (most with painted background images of dying Americans). They have gift shops selling candies, replica Viet Cong uniforms, and lighters made out of bullets, and even a shooting range within earshot in case anyone wants to try their hand at firing weapons in the jungle. It's almost easy to forget that the site is a battlefield, where soldiers fought and probably died just a few decades ago. It was surreal, and definitely an experience I'll remember for a while.

After our tour, we bused a short ways away for lunch. Our lunch spot was at a restaurant built onto a big wooden platform floating on the banks of a river. It was really cool (literally; the river air felt a whole lot better than in the humid, airless jungle). We had little spring rolls, grilled giant prawn, crunchy rice cakes with vegetables, chicken, and crispy baguette rolls. After eating, we hung out for a while and enjoyed the cool river breeze. The water was covered in these floating water plants, and if you stared at just the plants as they floated by, it gave the impression that the raft was floating down the river.

After lunch, we went back to a temple that we had seen before we got on the bus at the tunnels. It turned out to be a big memorial to all the people, soldiers and civilians, who had died in the District during the war. It was a massive complex, with beautiful gardens and fountains surrounding the central temple. The outer walls were covered in murals that depicted the oppression of the Vietnamese under the French, soldiers fighting during the war, and the eventual happiness at the war's end. We had to take our shoes off to enter the main temple. Inside the temple, there was a huge statue of Ho Chi Minh. All around the sides, the walls were covered with writing. They listed the names of every single person who had died in the District. I don't remember the exact number of names, but it covered the back and both side walls, with very little space to add more. Some of the Vietnamese students who had accompanies us lit incense at the alter in the temple. Reading the names was another indefinable experience. We really got a feel for the full cost of the war on the people in the area. We made one more stop, at the cemetery where all those people are interred. This was a weird experience, because a lot of the graves aren't yet finished. It was weird seeing rows and rows of graves juxtaposed with crews of workers hauling wheelbarrows and mixing cement for even more rows of graves. The site was empty except for us and the workers, so we had free reign to walk around and look at the graves. It added to the feelings I had already gotten while looking at the names back at the temple.

After a long bus ride home, we got to relax for a few hours at the hotel. Most of us were pretty beat from the morning. A couple of us guys went out for dinner before the tailor came to measure us for suits in the evening. We went to a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel, where I got banh xeo, which are these little omelet-like pancakes with vegetable and seafood filling inside (and they were really good!)

My favorite moment of the day, and probably one of my favorite moments of the whole trip, was on the bus ride back from the tunnels. We were driving through a rural area, passing by farmers huts and rice fields, and it started to rain. Looking out the bus windows over the rice fields in a rain storm that came out of nowhere, it felt like a scene pulled out of any Vietnam War film. It's hard to imaging such terrible things happening in such a beautiful country.